Immunity: Apocalypse Weird

by E. E. Giorgi

  This was different, though. He never saw spots. He never saw grainy stuff flickering in his field of vision. He blinked, several times. His eyes were fine. He could see the black. He could feel it, touch it almost. It drove him insane, he wanted to pull it off his eyes, blow it away, this stupid blackness that prevented him from seeing.

  And then he heard them. The voices. Help! I can’t see, please help. And the thuds, the bumps, the slams. People tripping, hitting walls, falling. The big explosion followed shortly after. It wasn’t near, but it was loud, and scary. The sound of metal crashing and glass shattering. He held his breath, waiting. Everybody did. And then the moaning started again.

  Please, help. I don’t know what’s happening, I just—

  I just can’t see.

  Nobody can.

  That’s when he knew. It wasn’t them. It was the whole world. Something bad was happening and it was everywhere. It affected everyone.

  David squeezed the arm of the old man and helped him get up. “Are you ok?” he asked again.

  “I think I hit my head,” the man replied, softly. “I was just walking and the lights went out or something,” he lisped.

  “We all saw it,” David replied, guiding him toward Jeff’s voice. “Or rather, unsaw it.”

  Arm in arm David shifted toward the middle of the room, groping for the closest empty chair.

  “Can anybody see?” Jeff called out. The place came alive with murmurs, voices, screeches of fear.

  “I can’t,” a woman whimpered.

  “Can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Is it the light? Did somebody turn off the light?”

  “Can’t be. It was broad daylight outside. Where did the sun go?”

  “I’m stuck in here,” another woman called. “Can somebody get me?”

  David delivered the old man to a chair and then raised his head. It was an instinct, a way of looking around, and yet there was nothing to see. He perked his ears, trying to decide from the complaints and groans and muted calls for help who was in most need.

  “Can you all hear me?” he called. The room fell silent again, and then, one by one, they all called a ‘yes,’ a ‘sure,’ a ‘loud and clear.’

  “I just wish I could see you, too,” somebody griped.

  “So do I, brother,” David muttered, for lack of anything better to say. About a dozen people in the room, he figured. “Looks like we’re all in this. So let’s try and not panic, ok?” He swallowed, trying to think of better words. Yet anything he could come up with sounded totally ridiculous. Hell, the sun had just vanished from the face of the Earth—what was there to panic about anyway?

  “We need to stick together,” David pressed on. Was he the right person to talk to them? Comfort them, help them out? Somebody had to take control of the situation and nobody else had stepped forward. “We’re all in this together. We need to take care of one another until we’ve got this figured out.”

  “You guys think it’s the virus?” a voice from the back of the room asked—a woman, not too young, not too old either. “We’ve all been quarantined because at some point we touched, talked to or interacted with Christine. Maybe it’s the virus already making us insane.”

  “Quite hard to all share the same insanity,” Jeff said. “And I haven’t heard reports of the virus making people blind.”

  David cleared his throat and spoke again. “Can you all account for your neighbor, colleague or friend? How many do we have missing?”

  The murmur rose again, people turning to whoever was standing next to them.

  Anu crossed David’s mind, the way she’d left the room a few hours earlier. I’d rather have you finish my program, she’d said. Bitch. Wasn’t it her fault he was stuck in this mess? And yet he’d chosen to be quarantined with her, so they could keep working on her project. He didn’t even have second thoughts about it, about being stuck in a building with a bunch of psychotic scientists. Hell, work is work anywhere. He even came this close to liking her last night, out there in the terrace. The way she’d talked about her mother. And then the rain, long awaited rain that purged everything, every bad thought, every bit of tension—everything.

  Why did he resent all that?

  Because he’d missed human interaction, he’d missed his friends, his dog, his small studio apartment, not a luxury home, but still his own home, his beloved Bay Area now turned into an exodus of people fleeing the radiation. He’d always been an extrovert, one of those guys who after a whole day spent in front of a computer screen needed to go grab a beer with friends, go to a Metallica concert and feel the heat of the crowd on his skin, let the loud music and screams fill his ears. Yes, he’d had girlfriends, more than he could remember, and yes, he missed some good old fun under the bed sheets. But more than anything he missed losing himself in a loud, slightly intoxicated crowd.

  Talking to a human being last night, instead of a crazy, driven scientist, felt good. He was craving a friend. And yet this morning Anu blankly reminded him that she was his boss, not his friend.

  I don’t give a shit where she is now.

  The people in the room were all talking at once now. Voices were good. Voices broke the blindness, voices came in colors to his ears, bringing bits of light in this blackness so thick you could slice it with a knife.

  “My friend Rosi,” a woman said—pink voice, David figured, with shades of red as it rose and fell in waves of a foreign cantabile. Argentinian accent, maybe? “She was with me downstairs at the gym. She left to get a drink of water at the fountain when all this happened. I managed to get back up here. I thought I was the only one going blind. It never occurred to me to look for her.”

  “How many do you think could still be down at the gym?” David asked.

  “There were about five or six.”

  “Most of the people are probably still in their rooms, wondering what the hell is happening,” another voice chimed in. Eastern accent, young, maybe in his forties. Blue, definitely a dark blue voice.

  “We should sweep through the rooms upstairs,” Jeff said, his voice farther away than before. He’d been moving, for some reason. “Go door to door and make sure everyone’s ok.”

  There was a buzz in the sky. They all heard it and they held their breaths, waiting.

  “It’s the end of times!” A woman yelled. “In the last days perilous times shall come, the Gospels say.”

  The buzz passed.

  “No, it’s one of the surveillance planes. The MQ-1 are still flying,” Jeff noticed.

  “They would, they’re unmanned,” the blue voice commented.

  “I tell you! This is the work of the Lord! And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon!”

  “Maybe. But in case you haven’t noticed, we can’t see any of that.”

  “I can’t even hear any noise from the outside,” a new voice commented. This one was green, with warm, lush tonalities like a summer breeze.

  The green voice was right. It wasn’t just the blindness, it was the void, the total, complete emptiness of all sounds. It was driving David insane. That’s why he was talking, why he wanted people to keep saying things, to tell their friends stories, to bring them all in the common area, to just sit together and decide what to do. How to survive this insanity.

  The phone rang. Sudden, and loud, it splintered a silence too abysmal to be real. They all froze.

  “Somebody please get that,” said the pink voice.

  David moved toward the rings, carefully, his hands raised in the blackness. Somebody picked up before he could get there.

  “Hello?” said the somebody, a rich, deep voice with a slight grate to it. “Yes. One moment.” A click. “You’re on speaker now.”

  There was a pause.

  “This is Joyce,” the phone said. “Joyce Warren, the Lab director.”

  As if they didn’t know who Joyce Warren was. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe whatever had taken away the light had also taken away identities, memories, emotions. The thought sent
a shiver down David’s spine.

  “Joyce!” the pink voice called. “Joyce, please help us! Please—”

  “I can’t. I’m—I’m sorry.”

  Black voice, charred at the edges. Black, like everything else.

  “What—what do you mean, Joyce?” This time it was Jeff, cool Jeff tainted with a pinch of dismay.

  Joyce sighed, the phone line crackled. “It appears we’re having a situation. Not just us. Everybody. And by that I mean the whole world. I called the White House. The line was busy. Every line I could think of was busy, even nine-one-one. Until a message came through. Recorded, from the President. Played on every landline on the premises.”

  “What did he have to say, Joyce?” David had grown impatient. He’d never met the woman in person, and it probably wasn’t best practice to address her by first name. But hell, just get on with it and tell us what’s going on!

  Joyce’s voice cracked. Nothing like the business-talking, woman-in-charge voice she’d showcased yesterday from the speakers. “The whole world has gone dark. Completely dark.”

  There was a collective gasp. Then a solid thud, and another. People were fainting. Sobbing. Moaning.

  “It’s the end of the world!” said the dark blue voice.

  “I’m not sure what it is,” Joyce replied. “We had an emergency truck crash into one of the military vehicles, you may have heard the explosion that followed. One of the chemical labs caught fire and we don’t know how many are injured or even dead. We think the emergency truck was trying to respond to the call. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do right now. We just can’t fight what we can’t see.”

  She sighed, blew her nose. “Despite the bleak news, believe me, compared to other places, we’re still lucky to be here on our premises. In his message, the President hinted at a cost in lives of disproportionate measures. If everybody’s experiencing what we’re experiencing now, can you imagine the chaos? Planes were taking off and landing as the blindness struck. Traffic was rushing through freeways, cars turning into streets, pulling out of parking lots, trucks unloading at docks, vehicles filling their tanks. Imagine every single one of these situations in complete blindness.”

  She sighed and repressed a sob. “I’m here in my office with General Naga, who is visiting for the day. Many of you were aware of this. The General is an old ally of ours and a good friend of Greg Terson, who’s on the Senate Committee for Energy and Natural Resources. Thanks to the General’s generosity, we are now able to fund part of the H7N7 database and continue our vaccine studies despite the NIH’s numerous delays in awarding the promised grants. General Naga comes highly recommended from the Secretary of Energy and is here to supervise the H7N7 research we’ve been developing here at the Lab. Thanks to his defense expertise, he can also help us develop new strategies against terroristic attacks like the one that just happened off the California coast. It’s just so unfortunate that this—her voice choked again. “That it had to happen during his generous visit.”

  She heaved a big sigh. “However, I’m not alone, and neither are you my fellow colleagues. The National Guard headquarters is here in the building, trying to make contact with their people. Lieutenant Colonel Vigil, the commander, and his staff are trying to reunite the troops. As of now, we don’t know about the Infantry patrolling the outskirts. We think—hope—there haven’t been many accidents as most of the lab had already been evacuated and most of us were indoors, working, when all this happened.

  “As you can imagine, the cities have been hit the hardest. Cars piled up along the freeways. Buildings on fire. People stuck in trains, airports, on roofs. Children screaming and calling for their parents. It’s a mess we can’t begin to measure. We have no idea how many casualties. And the worst part is…”

  There’s nothing we can do, David thought.

  “There’s nothing we can do but wait and hope that this is just a nightmare,” Joyce said over the phone, almost reading his mind.

  * * *

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” David asked.

  Jeff fumbled in his pockets. David heard the rustling of his hands against his clothes. “What time is it?” Jeff asked.

  There was an electronic bleep. And then: “The time is five forty-two p.m.,” an electronic voice replied.

  “There,” Jeff said. “This proves that iPhones are useful even without reception.” He chuckled, a silver sparkle in the complete darkness. Of course, the silver part was only in David’s imagination. Somehow, associating colors to voices and sounds helped his mood. Complete void frightened him. It brought back ghosts he wasn’t ready to deal with. So he filled the void with colors.

  They were standing in the stairwell to the upper floors, determined to gather everyone lost in the building and bring them back to the common area. Hands clutched along the cold, metal railing, they proceeded one step at the time, Jeff ahead, and David tagging behind.

  “Ok, I’m on the landing, now,” Jeff said. “The door should be somewhere near.”

  David listened to his footfalls. They echoed down the stairwell and vibrated through the metal structure. The rustling of hands against the wall. The shallow breathing of another human being. The blackness seemed to amplify every sound, every whisper, every sigh.

  It was frightening, really. As much as he tried not to think about it, he just couldn’t. The blackness was everywhere, even in his own thoughts.

  “There. Found it,” Jeff said. The click of a handle, the squeaking of hinges.

  For a moment David expected to see a shaft of light fan through the open door and chase the darkness away. Just like when he was a kid, hiding in his parents’ closet. And yet that darkness, companion of his childhood games, wasn’t like this one. He could still make out shadows in his parents’ closet. And a tiny pen of light would crawl from under the closet door. And then his cousin would spring the door open and scream, “Found you, Davy!” and for a moment the sudden light would burn his eyes.

  David squeezed his eyes shut, prepared for that burning sensation, for the light to come back… But it didn’t. The handle clicked under Jeff’s touch, the hinges squeaked, and the blackness remained.

  “Come on, find my hand,” Jeff said. “I’ll guide you through the door.”

  “It’s ok,” David reply, stepping forward with his arms stretched out. “I’ll—Ow! Damn it!”

  He hadn’t expected the wall to be so close and walked right into it. Man, it hurt. He doubled over, cupping his hands around his nose. He felt his own blood, warm and rusty, trickle down his fingers.

  “Hey, buddy. You ok?”

  “I hit my nose on the wall.” The pain was that intense. Blinding pain, he would’ve said, except it wouldn’t have been funny.

  Jeff was silent for a moment. “Do you need a minute?”

  David pinched his nose and sniffed. He wondered what to do about all the blood. Then he realized nobody was going to see it anyway. So he pulled up the front of his shirt and used it to wipe his face. He sniffed one more time, his nose tender and tingling. “I’m—I’m good.”

  He took Jeff’s hand this time and walked through the door behind him.

  “This is the third floor,” Jeff said. “There are doors on each side of the hall. We’ll just knock on every single one until people reply.”

  At first only silence answered their calls. By the time they got to the end of the corridor and turned around the bend, somebody started responding.

  “Who’s out there? Help! Please!”

  They found five people on the third floor and three on the fourth. The three on the fourth floor had all united in the same room, too afraid to move. They gathered blankets and pillows for the night, then formed a cordon and, hand in hand, moved back two floors down to the common area.

  Jeff felt strongly that they had all to be in one place, all accounted for. Together with David, they spent the rest of the evening—or whatever it was, hard to tell in the damn darkness—looking for people, until they fo
und two more postdocs and the five lab techs that had been missing. They had been in the gym the whole time, huddled together.

  Anu wasn’t there, though. The thought crossed David’s mind, but Jeff was the one who formulated the question. “Have you guys seen Dr. Sharma?”

  Nobody had. By then they had swept through all floors upstairs. Of all quarantined people, Anu was the only one still missing.

  David felt a pang, despite his earlier resentment. “Last time I spoke to her she said she was going to the gym.”

  “She never showed up,” one of the techs said. “I would’ve seen her. I was there the whole time.”

  “Damn it,” Jeff commented. “I hope she didn’t do anything stupid.”

  “Like she wouldn’t be capable of that,” David mumbled.

  People were starting to get the common area organized with makeshift beds for the night. They did one last head count and again, the only one missing was Anu. Jeff reassured David they had looked everywhere in the building and at this point there was nothing they could do. It was too dangerous to go out at night even when equipped with full eyesight. To go out looking for her now would be suicidal.

  The thought that Anu may have fallen ill and not heard their call as they knocked on doors did cross David’s mind. He didn’t dare it state it out loud, though.

  Any attempt to contact Joyce and the main offices on campus failed. All landlines had been disconnected. Cell phone reception was completely down, too. Yet people still found the strength to pull themselves together and fight whatever this was. The blue voice started singing Summertime, unveiling a deep, vibrant timbre. Soon, others joined in, filling the blackness with a rainbow of notes.

  The woman with the pink voice—Ariana was her name—had finally found her friend Rosi and together they had gathered plastic bottles from a recycling bin they’d found in the lobby and started going back and forth from the bathrooms to fill them with water.

  “So we have water,” Jeff mumbled. “Water is good. We should stock up. Who knows, if this continues for days we may get cut off at some point.”